Blog Post 5 - GH

Our time at ActionAid has been very challenging. Gabby and I had originally been given topics of climate change, gender, and livelihood resilience for which we based our initial research on a news article on ActionAid’s website. We went into Zambia with a distinct idea of what our research would be. However, on the first day we were presented with five different priority areas that ActionAid works within and told to pick a topic. During our pre-departure seminar, we had combined the topics of climate change, gender, and livelihood resilience together when in reality, those were three of the five priorities that ActionAid has. As a result, we spent the first week of at ActionAid reading through their Country Strategic Paper and other project frameworks trying to find our topic. The process was very time consuming because we had to read sufficiently in depth to understand where the gap in knowledge was for each priority and evaluate whether we had the capacity to contribute to this area.

We settled on women-led disaster management, which ironically contains the original three components sent to us. One of the weaknesses I identified during the pre-departure seminar was my reluctance to boldly ask for help or support. At Cornell, I struggle to knock on a professor’s door even when I have scheduled a meeting with them. However, because the success of our research depends on often unscheduled meetings, I have found that I have overcome my initial concerns about imposing my needs on someone’s time while still being respectful of our director’s busy schedule. Gabby has been a great source of support—she encourages me to contact our stakeholders even if we have no reference name.

Being bolder has been rewarding for our stakeholder meetings, communication with ActionAid remains a major challenge. We are only able to meet with our director by keeping an eye on his office door constantly and knocking several times throughout the day. Even though we sometimes communicate through Whatsapp and email, he never answers our meeting requests or questions about when he will be in the office. As a result, we often go into the office to meet him, just to find out that he is not there. Additionally, the program manager for our project has only been in the office few times this month. Gabby and I have made special efforts to keep ActionAid updated on our progress, but any communication with them involves only validation, rather than feedback. This is a big change from our normal Cornell research climate, where the balance is in the other direction: too much feedback and not enough validation. As a result, Gabby and I are very dependent on each other to provide feedback to each other to move our project forward. While this freedom allows us to take the project within our interests and gives us more independence, it also comes at the cost of lack of support. Only one of our several stakeholder meetings was successfully made through ActionAid. The rest were made through our own persistent communication.

Despite this, Gabby and I have had some rewarding stakeholder meetings. During these meetings, we are able to demonstrate the depth of our efforts and maturity as researchers, as well as directly and indirectly receive the feedback and support that we don’t receive from ActionAid. We have also had very promising meetings with Marja and Tine which have also provided us with the support we need to successfully complete the project.